Guided Brain Scans Might Boost the Care Factor

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What if you could zap your partner or friend so they "got you"
and felt more loving toward you? That sci-fi notion may not be
ready to serve up just yet, but scientists have found that a new
brain-training method may help people feel more empathy.

Showing people visual cues about their brain state can improve
their ability to focus on affection and tenderness, at least in a
lab setting. The new technique, detailed today (May 21) in the
journal PLOS ONE, could perhaps be used to treat people
struggling with a lack of empathic feelings, such as women with
postpartum depression or those with antisocial personality
disorder.

"One could potentially develop brain neurofeedback protocols in
which you can train the brain," to ramp up empathic feelings,
said study co-author Dr. Jorge Moll Neto, a cognitive
neuroscientist at the Instituto D'Or de Pesquisa e Ensino in
Brazil.

Compassion meditation, which involves repeating certain phrases
or focusing on thoughts to increase feelings of loving kindness,
has been shown to boost feelings of empathy. But though Buddhist
monks have practiced compassion meditation for hundreds of years,
meditation doesn't provide feedback to participants on how well
they're doing.

To see if they could train people to control their level of
empathy, Neto and his colleagues asked 25 healthy volunteers who
had no training in meditation to sit in a functional magnetic
resonance imaging scanner while thinking about a time when they
felt particularly tender or affectionate toward loved ones.

The team then used that information as a baseline to determine
how the participants' brains lit up while experiencing loving
feelings.

The next day, the volunteers were asked to go back into the
scanners and asked to focus on feelings of
empathy.

A computer algorithm compared the baseline brain activity when
participants were thinking about loved ones with their brain
activity the second day, when they were asked to conjure up
feelings of empathy.

For half the participants, software then immediately converted
that change into a rendering of a ring, which the participants
viewed in real time. Others did not receive this feedback.

The more closely their feelings matched those from the day
before, the more perfectly round the ring appeared, whereas less
empathetic sentiments shown on the brain scans for the second day
were translated into more distorted rings.

"We wanted them to strongly feel those emotions, and the ring was
just working as a signal to tell them if they are going in the
right direction," Neto told Live Science.

Empathy exercises

After four 15-minute training sessions in a single day, study
volunteers showed more activity in the brain regions responsible
for empathy compared to those who did not get the guided feedback
on their brain state.

The new method is an improvement over other methods of neurofeedback
that train regions of the brain associated with emotional
processing, the researchers say. For instance, training that
relies on an electroencephalogram (EEG) doesn't provide a highly
detailed understanding of the brain's state, so it can take 20
sessions for such training to be effective.

The new technique could one day be used in situations where
feelings of empathy are lacking. For instance, women suffering
from postpartum depression could use these methods to increase
their bonding with their baby, while getting simultaneous
visualization training to decrease negative emotions such as
anxiety and frustration, Neto said. Couples could also use the
technique in therapy to boost their compassion for each other.

Before such training could be widely applied, the team needs to
show it actually impacts people's feelings of empathy beyond the
lab. And simply being capable of conjuring up empathic feelings
may not be enough, as even
psychopaths can feel empathy when they want to.